I do agree that Google shouldn't, by default, look into other users' home directories. This makes a lot of sense, and as you say can't be hard to do. But I think you might be mistaken in thinking that there are file permissions blocking Google's way. The problem is that Windows programmers don't tend to put file permissions, encryption, or other protection on their files; you can't really tell what's yours and what isn't.
I do, however, suspect that Google probably overlooked the idea of NOT searching through other users' directories, and I think that would be a great addition. I can see how it would be easy to overlook, in the excitement of writing a whole-drive search utility.
There's certainly no malice here, and even more so, no security flaw.
So the SCOTUS gets to decide which laws apply and what facts are true about the case. That's obvious.
The only question is whether "The Judicial Power" mentioned at the beginning of the sentance conveyed more than jurisdiction over law and fact of Cases (in other words, the ability to choose which laws applied to which situations, and to judge which situations actually happened). On the face of things, it seems like a weak claim to say that this phrase conveys more power than is explicitly stated through the rest of the section; and there's more evidence to weaken your claim still further, both in the situation as designed and in the writings of the authors and signatories.
I'm not going to go on -- this is Slashdot, and I'd be wasting my time. But think about it -- the founders built a federal republic and attempted to implement checks and balances. Would they have placed an unelected institution above both of the elected ones, and above the constitution itself? Why would they make amendments so hard to get if amendments could be practically achieved by the court's choice of interpretations?
-Billy
Re:Hibernate is good, but I am using Prevayler mor
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Are Java class mappings to databases really all that exciting?
Well, evidently not -- since the author was excited about Prevlayer, which isn't a mapping to a database.
Given his quote, wouldn't that be rather like waiting for a good roman-number computation from Einstein? I mean, given that Pike has proven his skill and has stated that he doesn't like OO (in so many words), you're just faking it if you claim to be waiting for an OO design.
Either respect what he's done, or don't.
Personally, I have a limited agreement, and I suspect he meant it in the same sense that I agree. I believe that like roman numerals, OOD has a limited utility, but when used for purposes outside of that, other things work better. I will say that I also belive that unlike roman numerals, OO doesn't seem to have any _huge_ weaknesses.
No, we do not. As an investor to a company, you don't have any rights to see ANY confidential corporate memos.
Whoops, I missed one thing -- we don't have FOAI. That's the ONE safeguard you mentioned that we can't get from corporations that, in theory, we can get from our government.
Unfortunately, there's two problems with this.
First, the information you'd be asking for is something like "did you ever read any of my emails?" That sort of info is easily hidden, to say the least, and trivial enough that it would almost never be demanded (from government OR corporations).
Second, making FOIA or anything like it apply to anything other than government and at the miniscule scales you're asking for would be the opposite of what you want (privacy).
You don't have rights to see much more than released financial statements. And if you do, and you act on that information, you get charged with insider trading.
Nonsense. The only sort of action that could recieve that charge involves/trading/ (buying or selling stock). Informing the public is neither trading nor insider; nor is refusing to be a customer; nor are lawsuits. All are powerful actions against a private company; the second (refusing to be a customer) is the useless against the gov't, and the third (lawsuit) is only mostly effective against the gov't (remember, they can write themselves exceptions to their own laws).
If you want high speed digital service, MOST people in the US do not have a choice, it's the cable company or no one.
Yes, if you restrict yourself enough you can find yourself with only one option (and you might decide that it's not an acceptable option). So stop restricting yourself. Move, or use lower-speed access. Whatever floats your boat.
Nobody *has* to use a goverment ISP. Just like nobody has to use Time Warner Cable. If you want to be online, then that may be your only choice to get online, but you are not forced to be online.
I didn't say "use"; I said "participate", and I immediately explained what I meant. But thank you for expanding on my rebuttal to your claim that people could be forced to use bad ISPs.
As for having to pay for it through taxes, that's a moot point. You have to pay for the post office, pay to have roads built, pay for support of the arts, to provide police protection for KKK marches, to build a new sports stadium. You pay for a lot of things that you don't agree with, or don't derive any beneifts from, the gvmt spends money for everyone, so skip it.
I'm not complaining about "not gaining benefits". I'm complaining about not having the total capital available to make private ISPs successful. I definitely don't like being taxed; but I'm pointing out a different fact now, that this tax both reduces the amount of capital available AND reduces the demand level enormously, so that you and I would almost certainly not be able to find ISPs that offer privacy-favorable contracts for any price.
The ISP has rights to monitor data traffic, but does not have rights to look into the contents; the email data is not their property.
A brilliant argument (seriously). Unfortunately, it doesn't conform to current laws, and any laws that would make it conformable would also be extremely deadly to freedom of information in general.
The problem is that information/data isn't property. It's in a category of its own. Some people are attempting to make old laws apply to it by calling it "intellectual property", but the old laws tend to be bad fits. New theories will have to be constructed on this; until they are, I'll use the analogy of me standing in your backyard. You have every right to look at me while I'm there and collect all the information about my appearance (where I am, what I'm holding), even if you gave me permission to stand there -- unless, of course, we have some kind of agreement that you won't.
Bad analogy, I think. In particular, no segregation is being practiced; anyone can get an ISP that offers reasonable non-snooping promises. In fact, an ISP without non-snooping policies seems to be valued very low by the free market -- there are free ones out there.
Consider the reprecussions if this is legal. Microsoft (or GMail or Yahoo) would be within their rights to 1.) ready your incoming e-mail, 2.) look for commercially useful data about your shopping habits or personal preferences, and 3.) act on that information.
They do all that already -- GMail admits it and is open; the other can and probably do, and are secretive about it. The real question is what, precisely, is allowed in step 3 (Act on That Information).
Yes, of course. You expect that from the government, and luckily we have checks and balances in the government. We have watchdog groups. We have the FOIA. We have none of these covering private businesses; the only way we'd know an ISP was reading mail is if they did something stupid, or a whistleblower speaks out. We have no checks and balances with private businesses.
Wait. NONE of that is true. We have all of those things covering private businesses; we also have one other critical thing: with a private business, we have the ability to refuse to do business with them. With the government, we have no such right.
If the gov't sets up an ISP offerring free wireless broadband, you MUST participate -- the gov't doesn't ASK you whether you want to pay taxes to support it. If they later decide to use their rights as an ISP to monitor everything, again we have no right to prevent that -- it's their property, even though they took it from you by force.
Actually, I would say that if the gov't were to set up any such system, the only way to legitimately apply property rights would be to either allow EVERY taxpayer the right to view all the data, or allow nobody (including the FBI and the system administrators) the right to view the data. The second choice is impossible using current technology, and the first choice is kind of ugly but honest (it would work and be useful -- it would make the system a kind of bulletin board).
So you'd accept the ISP coming over to your house in the middle of the night with a team of thugs to beat you into confessing?
Um... No? That's a stupid, stupid question. He's saying that an ISP has property rights in their servers; so long as they don't violate their contracts, there's no injustice done. There's nothing at all in the property rights argument to indicate anything about giving ISPs or anyone else licence to violate your property and personal rights.
What matters is that these conversations should be private, and there's a reasonable expectation that they will be private.
Now this is fair, and I agree with you in essence. Not everything must be explicitly mentioned in every contract; some things are reasonably assumed. I personally wouldn't expect my emails to go 100% unread unless the contract specified that (and I personally would be suspicious of such a claim, since it's unenforcable), but I would expect (for example) that people in the ISP wouldn't use information from them to (for example) compete against me. If they did, I'd throw an unfair competition or misappropriation of trade secrets lawsuit against them, claiming that I used their company to deliver a message not knowing that some of the employees were competing.
There are other examples to support parts of your case, and most of those examples can be worked very well with current laws. In no case, however, does it make sense to claim some kind of absolute right to privacy aside from consideration of property rights.
Install Windows 3.1 to do word processing? Is someone insane?
Use PC/Geos 2.x, if you're stuck with an old machine. MAN, that was a nice word processor; it had page layout capabilities that I've never seen outside of professional DTP programs, and yet it was EASY to use.
Targeted ads that read my messages, gee, what a great *feature* !
Seriously, it IS a feature. My conversations in emails are far more likely to be about something of enduring interest to me, so ads targetting them will be of much higher interest than mere web ads. So I'll be informed of things that I'm interested in. Nice. So long, of course, as my privacy is respected (and it is) and the ads can be ignored so I can accomplish my main purpose in dealing with the email (and they can -- they're very tasteful).
No taglines as of yet. However, this still does not impress me as a 'feature'
You imply that Google is chomping at the bit to add taglines any day now, rather than advertising the fact that they don't have taglines and never will.
You're dead wrong about gmail's speed -- I've used a lot of them, and gmail is unique in this respect. You are right about the long-overdue draft feature, but at least they finally have it -- it's been pretty much my only complaint.
Just in summary, for those people that don't have a Gmail account, don't hold your breath, it ain't that exciting!
Well, this at least is reasonable. It's just an email account with a fast, cunning user interface, tons of storage, and excellent searching. That's nice, very nice, but it's not worth hyper or hypo ventilating over:-).
WOW! This is the one big thing I've been missing all along. GMail's interface is great for many things, but it's truly horrible for responding to part of a message and then coming back later to respond to the rest. Now I can respond to the part I have now, and postpone the message until I can pull the rest together.
This makes things SO much easier.
-Billy
Re:WHAT, the Contacts section actually works?
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You're using the Firefox prerelease together with the good old Tab extension, right? They don't work together well with GMail. You'll have to either accept gmail _never_ being able to open up a popup window, or uninstall/disable tabbrowser until they fix their Javascript.
-Billy
Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet
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Did you say that OWA was the most impressive web email that exists? Are you serious? How so?
I've had to use it for years at two workplaces, and I can't STAND it. Admittedly I've seen worse webmails, but not MUCH worse. It's slow, has a TERRIBLE user interface (for example, to delete all selected messages you click on an icon of a checked box), doesn't seem to have any real use of scripting aside from popups...
What am I missing?
-Billy
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You are all blinded by your desperate need to have your radioactivity.
I do agree -- economics is one of my favorite pastimes. I should have made that clear. I'm just annoyed by all the BS that's slung about as though it were gospel -- and this particular flavor of BS is supposed to be gospel because Nobel approved the author:-).
Having read the article, I'd have to read the paper to judge the BS quotient -- but it looks to me like the author is writing for Americans, not for economics; it seems he's only considering the local short-term consequences of offshoring, not the global ones.
It's facinating that he's referring to modern liberals as "traditional liberals". Doesn't anyone remember the classical liberals anymore -- people like Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and so on?
Every advance you list as good was initially opposed for exactly the same reason you oppose offshoring. Consider how many people were put out of work by the assembly line! But the net change is that global resources are used more efficiently, and everybody is happier.
In the case of offshoring the benefits are distributed more widely than ever before, so it's not surprising that some jingoists aren't seeing them (they only look at their home country anyhow). But even the jingoists have to admit that having more people available to fill a heavily demanded need is better. Perhaps the price drop is small, but the availability of the good is much better.
The oreo "problem" you describe is just the nature of action, not a sin that 5 year olds are guilty of. It's always true that there's a time preference for goods; that's what causes the phenomenon of interest rates.
Free markets in interest rates and loans allow people to be able to calibrate their desires. We could, if we wanted, calculate the interest rate on your cookie example (it'd be pretty high!), but because it involves such a small amount of money it's not worth the trouble calculating.
My point is that people who DO use sophisticated calculations disagree with your conclusion. They also tend to disagree with your premises: Ricardo himself, whose work this paper is based upon, justified the principle that every entity is best off if each entity produces the item that it's best (most profitable) at producing, regardless of what everyone else is doing, and imports everything else. That's a simplified statement, and ignores the fact that entities are proficient at multiple things (Ricardo's analysis takes this into account), but the conclusion is the same: no man (nor country) is an island.
Buying from out of (country|state|city|household) will reduce the income in your local area -- but if that starts happening, it's a sign that your local area isn't the most efficient place to produce those things. (Note that this only addresses cost imbalances caused by trade, not trade wars. Trade wars can be counterbalanced by other things.)
There are a few interesting things about this particular Nobel. First, it wasn't created by Nobel. Second, it's the only Nobel prize where the winners are regularly granted awards for work that blatantly and entirely contradicts previous winners. (I'm not saying that this shouldn't happen; I'm saying that it shouldn't happen all the time.)
I think there's a reason why Nobel didn't include economics in his original set of prizes; I think it's because he realised that his purpose was to promote progress, and there can be no progress when people can't decide which direction is "forward".
So anyhow, I'm starting out my read not too impressed with the credential of "Nobel laureate".
Is there a patch to python that can alter that syntax?
Yes. Actually, it turns out the code's been in Python for a long time, but Guido only recently started documenting it, and like the metaclass hack, it has a lot of untapped potential.
Unlike the metaclass hack, it's surprisingly simple.:-)
Here's a typical Python function in the old style:
x = 3 if x == 3:
print "Hello"
Here's one using a bit of the new, optional syntax:
x = 3 if x == 3: #{
print "Hello" #}
As you can see, this offers all of the advantages of curly braces. In fact, it only starts here. There's much more; so powerful are these "hash" prefix characters that they can be used to form other languages' block delimiters as well. Here's some examples:
Ada:
x = 3 if x == 3: # then
print "Hello" #end if
Ruby:
x = 3 if x == 3:
print "Hello" #end
A plethora of possibilities is present. Alliteration initially unintentional.
Some are working on making the "hash" syntax marker work with natural language, to form a type of code documentation we're calling "comments" (named after a similar, rarely used construct that appeared in Fortran-77). These people are misguided, of course, and such constructs will certainly never be widely used; but in theory such capabilities would add a lot to a language.
And anyhow, every programmer knows the difference between a space and a tab. And that neither one is "nothing". Anyone who tells you otherwise should try looking at C code written by hardware engineers someday (NO indentation at all).
The beauty of Python is that merely doing the responsible thing -- indenting your program -- makes it work. Someone who wants to "just make it work" (like, for example, a hardware programmer modifying C code) will automatically write approachable code; they HAVE to. No burden is added, since Python _replaces_ tracking curly braces with tracking indentation. And indentation is FAR more noticeable and visible.
The funny thing is that I agree with you; I never liked Bush's past. I think he's shown some evidence of having outgrown it, but *none* of being willing to face it.
If that was what people were ragging on Bush about, I'd join them. I've certainly done my share of complaining.
Seriously. Really. You literally don't care about what else would have been done; you merely don't want THAT to have been done.
The only motivations I can guess at for your attitude are:
1. A deep hatred of kids. 2. A deep hatred of Bush. 3. A personal knowledge of what should have been done.
The first two elements are clearly present in your screed, judging from the words you use to describe the two. The third element isn't present in anything you've said; my guessing at it is relatively unjustified (although to be fair, I do suspect that you actually have something, even though you haven't hinted at it yet).
So come out with it. What SHOULD have been done? And why should Bush have known that this was the right thing to do, and that it was exclusive of staying in the class for the remaining 7 minutes? You MUST be able to answer both questions in order to make the argument you're making; since you're making the argument so strongly, your answers had better be equally strong.
Keep in mind that presidents HAVE been "fired" before for dereliction of duty (well, only one that I know of). The military can't kick someone out of office, of course, but they can and have removed clearance to see things like nuclear plans.
F911 is an extremely powerful film. Which is why the right wingers seek to discredit Moore at any cost.
True and true.
If it didn't have a lot of substance and truth in it, they wouldn't be so afraid of people seeing it.
And then... Boom, non sequitur. The fact that it's powerful doesn't mean it's true. And the fact that they're afraid of people seeing it doesn't mean it's full of substance and truth.
That's bad logic. Spun facts are harder to check than outright lies; if you just check the spun facts, all you'll find is that they're true. The fact that OTHER facts exist that disprove the "spun" conclusion isn't immediately obvious.
In Moore's case, this isn't quite as difficult; many of his "spins" are easily rebutted, since he played tricks like dubbing the wrong answer into his questions, thereby making it look like the answerer was an idiot or dishonest when actually the answer was straightforward and correct. Distortions of that type count as outright lies, since you're presenting things as though one event happened when actually a completely different one did.
I dont have a time machine to go to vietnam to tell if they are lieing, all i can do is look at teh documentation... which says they are lieing.
I guess you're talking about the Swifties now. Their claims are that the awards are improper and some of the documentation is fabricated. How does looking at the documentation help with that? It's begging the question.
Personally, I don't care about the Swifties. I'm willing to give Kerry 100% credit for his medals and awards for his 4 months in Vietnam. He got shot at; I didn't (not having been born at the time). I don't care one bit whether he got a little more credit than he really deserved for one or four specific acts. I still respect his service, and consider it a credit to him.
But it's still only four months, and many other things he's done since weigh heavier on his character, pro and con. Look at them!
Slashdot Mirror
I do agree that Google shouldn't, by default, look into other users' home directories. This makes a lot of sense, and as you say can't be hard to do. But I think you might be mistaken in thinking that there are file permissions blocking Google's way. The problem is that Windows programmers don't tend to put file permissions, encryption, or other protection on their files; you can't really tell what's yours and what isn't.
I do, however, suspect that Google probably overlooked the idea of NOT searching through other users' directories, and I think that would be a great addition. I can see how it would be easy to overlook, in the excitement of writing a whole-drive search utility.
There's certainly no malice here, and even more so, no security flaw.
-Billy
So the SCOTUS gets to decide which laws apply and what facts are true about the case. That's obvious.
The only question is whether "The Judicial Power" mentioned at the beginning of the sentance conveyed more than jurisdiction over law and fact of Cases (in other words, the ability to choose which laws applied to which situations, and to judge which situations actually happened). On the face of things, it seems like a weak claim to say that this phrase conveys more power than is explicitly stated through the rest of the section; and there's more evidence to weaken your claim still further, both in the situation as designed and in the writings of the authors and signatories.
I'm not going to go on -- this is Slashdot, and I'd be wasting my time. But think about it -- the founders built a federal republic and attempted to implement checks and balances. Would they have placed an unelected institution above both of the elected ones, and above the constitution itself? Why would they make amendments so hard to get if amendments could be practically achieved by the court's choice of interpretations?
-Billy
Are Java class mappings to databases really all that exciting?
Well, evidently not -- since the author was excited about Prevlayer, which isn't a mapping to a database.
-Billy
Given his quote, wouldn't that be rather like waiting for a good roman-number computation from Einstein? I mean, given that Pike has proven his skill and has stated that he doesn't like OO (in so many words), you're just faking it if you claim to be waiting for an OO design.
Either respect what he's done, or don't.
Personally, I have a limited agreement, and I suspect he meant it in the same sense that I agree. I believe that like roman numerals, OOD has a limited utility, but when used for purposes outside of that, other things work better. I will say that I also belive that unlike roman numerals, OO doesn't seem to have any _huge_ weaknesses.
-Billy
No, we do not. As an investor to a company, you don't have any rights to see ANY confidential corporate memos.
/trading/ (buying or selling stock). Informing the public is neither trading nor insider; nor is refusing to be a customer; nor are lawsuits. All are powerful actions against a private company; the second (refusing to be a customer) is the useless against the gov't, and the third (lawsuit) is only mostly effective against the gov't (remember, they can write themselves exceptions to their own laws).
Whoops, I missed one thing -- we don't have FOAI. That's the ONE safeguard you mentioned that we can't get from corporations that, in theory, we can get from our government.
Unfortunately, there's two problems with this.
First, the information you'd be asking for is something like "did you ever read any of my emails?" That sort of info is easily hidden, to say the least, and trivial enough that it would almost never be demanded (from government OR corporations).
Second, making FOIA or anything like it apply to anything other than government and at the miniscule scales you're asking for would be the opposite of what you want (privacy).
You don't have rights to see much more than released financial statements. And if you do, and you act on that information, you get charged with insider trading.
Nonsense. The only sort of action that could recieve that charge involves
If you want high speed digital service, MOST people in the US do not have a choice, it's the cable company or no one.
Yes, if you restrict yourself enough you can find yourself with only one option (and you might decide that it's not an acceptable option). So stop restricting yourself. Move, or use lower-speed access. Whatever floats your boat.
Nobody *has* to use a goverment ISP. Just like nobody has to use Time Warner Cable. If you want to be online, then that may be your only choice to get online, but you are not forced to be online.
I didn't say "use"; I said "participate", and I immediately explained what I meant. But thank you for expanding on my rebuttal to your claim that people could be forced to use bad ISPs.
As for having to pay for it through taxes, that's a moot point. You have to pay for the post office, pay to have roads built, pay for support of the arts, to provide police protection for KKK marches, to build a new sports stadium. You pay for a lot of things that you don't agree with, or don't derive any beneifts from, the gvmt spends money for everyone, so skip it.
I'm not complaining about "not gaining benefits". I'm complaining about not having the total capital available to make private ISPs successful. I definitely don't like being taxed; but I'm pointing out a different fact now, that this tax both reduces the amount of capital available AND reduces the demand level enormously, so that you and I would almost certainly not be able to find ISPs that offer privacy-favorable contracts for any price.
The ISP has rights to monitor data traffic, but does not have rights to look into the contents; the email data is not their property.
A brilliant argument (seriously). Unfortunately, it doesn't conform to current laws, and any laws that would make it conformable would also be extremely deadly to freedom of information in general.
The problem is that information/data isn't property. It's in a category of its own. Some people are attempting to make old laws apply to it by calling it "intellectual property", but the old laws tend to be bad fits. New theories will have to be constructed on this; until they are, I'll use the analogy of me standing in your backyard. You have every right to look at me while I'm there and collect all the information about my appearance (where I am, what I'm holding), even if you gave me permission to stand there -- unless, of course, we have some kind of agreement that you won't.
If it were, then the ISP could be held f
Bad analogy, I think. In particular, no segregation is being practiced; anyone can get an ISP that offers reasonable non-snooping promises. In fact, an ISP without non-snooping policies seems to be valued very low by the free market -- there are free ones out there.
-Billy
Consider the reprecussions if this is legal. Microsoft (or GMail or Yahoo) would be within their rights to 1.) ready your incoming e-mail, 2.) look for commercially useful data about your shopping habits or personal preferences, and 3.) act on that information.
They do all that already -- GMail admits it and is open; the other can and probably do, and are secretive about it. The real question is what, precisely, is allowed in step 3 (Act on That Information).
-Billy
Yes, of course. You expect that from the government, and luckily we have checks and balances in the government. We have watchdog groups. We have the FOIA. We have none of these covering private businesses; the only way we'd know an ISP was reading mail is if they did something stupid, or a whistleblower speaks out. We have no checks and balances with private businesses.
Wait. NONE of that is true. We have all of those things covering private businesses; we also have one other critical thing: with a private business, we have the ability to refuse to do business with them. With the government, we have no such right.
If the gov't sets up an ISP offerring free wireless broadband, you MUST participate -- the gov't doesn't ASK you whether you want to pay taxes to support it. If they later decide to use their rights as an ISP to monitor everything, again we have no right to prevent that -- it's their property, even though they took it from you by force.
Actually, I would say that if the gov't were to set up any such system, the only way to legitimately apply property rights would be to either allow EVERY taxpayer the right to view all the data, or allow nobody (including the FBI and the system administrators) the right to view the data. The second choice is impossible using current technology, and the first choice is kind of ugly but honest (it would work and be useful -- it would make the system a kind of bulletin board).
So you'd accept the ISP coming over to your house in the middle of the night with a team of thugs to beat you into confessing?
Um... No? That's a stupid, stupid question. He's saying that an ISP has property rights in their servers; so long as they don't violate their contracts, there's no injustice done. There's nothing at all in the property rights argument to indicate anything about giving ISPs or anyone else licence to violate your property and personal rights.
What matters is that these conversations should be private, and there's a reasonable expectation that they will be private.
Now this is fair, and I agree with you in essence. Not everything must be explicitly mentioned in every contract; some things are reasonably assumed. I personally wouldn't expect my emails to go 100% unread unless the contract specified that (and I personally would be suspicious of such a claim, since it's unenforcable), but I would expect (for example) that people in the ISP wouldn't use information from them to (for example) compete against me. If they did, I'd throw an unfair competition or misappropriation of trade secrets lawsuit against them, claiming that I used their company to deliver a message not knowing that some of the employees were competing.
There are other examples to support parts of your case, and most of those examples can be worked very well with current laws. In no case, however, does it make sense to claim some kind of absolute right to privacy aside from consideration of property rights.
-Billy
Install Windows 3.1 to do word processing? Is someone insane?
Use PC/Geos 2.x, if you're stuck with an old machine. MAN, that was a nice word processor; it had page layout capabilities that I've never seen outside of professional DTP programs, and yet it was EASY to use.
-Billy
Targeted ads that read my messages, gee, what a great *feature* !
:-).
Seriously, it IS a feature. My conversations in emails are far more likely to be about something of enduring interest to me, so ads targetting them will be of much higher interest than mere web ads. So I'll be informed of things that I'm interested in. Nice. So long, of course, as my privacy is respected (and it is) and the ads can be ignored so I can accomplish my main purpose in dealing with the email (and they can -- they're very tasteful).
No taglines as of yet. However, this still does not impress me as a 'feature'
You imply that Google is chomping at the bit to add taglines any day now, rather than advertising the fact that they don't have taglines and never will.
You're dead wrong about gmail's speed -- I've used a lot of them, and gmail is unique in this respect. You are right about the long-overdue draft feature, but at least they finally have it -- it's been pretty much my only complaint.
Just in summary, for those people that don't have a Gmail account, don't hold your breath, it ain't that exciting!
Well, this at least is reasonable. It's just an email account with a fast, cunning user interface, tons of storage, and excellent searching. That's nice, very nice, but it's not worth hyper or hypo ventilating over
-Billy
WOW! This is the one big thing I've been missing all along. GMail's interface is great for many things, but it's truly horrible for responding to part of a message and then coming back later to respond to the rest. Now I can respond to the part I have now, and postpone the message until I can pull the rest together.
This makes things SO much easier.
-Billy
You're using the Firefox prerelease together with the good old Tab extension, right? They don't work together well with GMail. You'll have to either accept gmail _never_ being able to open up a popup window, or uninstall/disable tabbrowser until they fix their Javascript.
-Billy
Did you say that OWA was the most impressive web email that exists? Are you serious? How so?
I've had to use it for years at two workplaces, and I can't STAND it. Admittedly I've seen worse webmails, but not MUCH worse. It's slow, has a TERRIBLE user interface (for example, to delete all selected messages you click on an icon of a checked box), doesn't seem to have any real use of scripting aside from popups...
What am I missing?
-Billy
You are all blinded by your desperate need to have your radioactivity.
.sig quote.
I MUST have this
-Billy
I do agree -- economics is one of my favorite pastimes. I should have made that clear. I'm just annoyed by all the BS that's slung about as though it were gospel -- and this particular flavor of BS is supposed to be gospel because Nobel approved the author :-).
Having read the article, I'd have to read the paper to judge the BS quotient -- but it looks to me like the author is writing for Americans, not for economics; it seems he's only considering the local short-term consequences of offshoring, not the global ones.
-Billy
It's facinating that he's referring to modern liberals as "traditional liberals". Doesn't anyone remember the classical liberals anymore -- people like Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and so on?
-Billy
Every advance you list as good was initially opposed for exactly the same reason you oppose offshoring. Consider how many people were put out of work by the assembly line! But the net change is that global resources are used more efficiently, and everybody is happier.
In the case of offshoring the benefits are distributed more widely than ever before, so it's not surprising that some jingoists aren't seeing them (they only look at their home country anyhow). But even the jingoists have to admit that having more people available to fill a heavily demanded need is better. Perhaps the price drop is small, but the availability of the good is much better.
-Billy
The oreo "problem" you describe is just the nature of action, not a sin that 5 year olds are guilty of. It's always true that there's a time preference for goods; that's what causes the phenomenon of interest rates.
Free markets in interest rates and loans allow people to be able to calibrate their desires. We could, if we wanted, calculate the interest rate on your cookie example (it'd be pretty high!), but because it involves such a small amount of money it's not worth the trouble calculating.
My point is that people who DO use sophisticated calculations disagree with your conclusion. They also tend to disagree with your premises: Ricardo himself, whose work this paper is based upon, justified the principle that every entity is best off if each entity produces the item that it's best (most profitable) at producing, regardless of what everyone else is doing, and imports everything else. That's a simplified statement, and ignores the fact that entities are proficient at multiple things (Ricardo's analysis takes this into account), but the conclusion is the same: no man (nor country) is an island.
Buying from out of (country|state|city|household) will reduce the income in your local area -- but if that starts happening, it's a sign that your local area isn't the most efficient place to produce those things. (Note that this only addresses cost imbalances caused by trade, not trade wars. Trade wars can be counterbalanced by other things.)
-Billy
There are a few interesting things about this particular Nobel. First, it wasn't created by Nobel. Second, it's the only Nobel prize where the winners are regularly granted awards for work that blatantly and entirely contradicts previous winners. (I'm not saying that this shouldn't happen; I'm saying that it shouldn't happen all the time.)
I think there's a reason why Nobel didn't include economics in his original set of prizes; I think it's because he realised that his purpose was to promote progress, and there can be no progress when people can't decide which direction is "forward".
So anyhow, I'm starting out my read not too impressed with the credential of "Nobel laureate".
Yes. Actually, it turns out the code's been in Python for a long time, but Guido only recently started documenting it, and like the metaclass hack, it has a lot of untapped potential.
Unlike the metaclass hack, it's surprisingly simple.
Here's a typical Python function in the old style:Here's one using a bit of the new, optional syntax:As you can see, this offers all of the advantages of curly braces. In fact, it only starts here. There's much more; so powerful are these "hash" prefix characters that they can be used to form other languages' block delimiters as well. Here's some examples:
Ada:Ruby:A plethora of possibilities is present. Alliteration initially unintentional.
Some are working on making the "hash" syntax marker work with natural language, to form a type of code documentation we're calling "comments" (named after a similar, rarely used construct that appeared in Fortran-77). These people are misguided, of course, and such constructs will certainly never be widely used; but in theory such capabilities would add a lot to a language.
-Billy
Try it. You'll like it.
And anyhow, every programmer knows the difference between a space and a tab. And that neither one is "nothing". Anyone who tells you otherwise should try looking at C code written by hardware engineers someday (NO indentation at all).
The beauty of Python is that merely doing the responsible thing -- indenting your program -- makes it work. Someone who wants to "just make it work" (like, for example, a hardware programmer modifying C code) will automatically write approachable code; they HAVE to. No burden is added, since Python _replaces_ tracking curly braces with tracking indentation. And indentation is FAR more noticeable and visible.
-Billy
The funny thing is that I agree with you; I never liked Bush's past. I think he's shown some evidence of having outgrown it, but *none* of being willing to face it.
If that was what people were ragging on Bush about, I'd join them. I've certainly done my share of complaining.
-Billy
Seriously. Really. You literally don't care about what else would have been done; you merely don't want THAT to have been done.
The only motivations I can guess at for your attitude are:
1. A deep hatred of kids.
2. A deep hatred of Bush.
3. A personal knowledge of what should have been done.
The first two elements are clearly present in your screed, judging from the words you use to describe the two. The third element isn't present in anything you've said; my guessing at it is relatively unjustified (although to be fair, I do suspect that you actually have something, even though you haven't hinted at it yet).
So come out with it. What SHOULD have been done? And why should Bush have known that this was the right thing to do, and that it was exclusive of staying in the class for the remaining 7 minutes? You MUST be able to answer both questions in order to make the argument you're making; since you're making the argument so strongly, your answers had better be equally strong.
Keep in mind that presidents HAVE been "fired" before for dereliction of duty (well, only one that I know of). The military can't kick someone out of office, of course, but they can and have removed clearance to see things like nuclear plans.
-Billy
F911 is an extremely powerful film. Which is why the right wingers seek to discredit Moore at any cost.
True and true.
If it didn't have a lot of substance and truth in it, they wouldn't be so afraid of people seeing it.
And then... Boom, non sequitur. The fact that it's powerful doesn't mean it's true. And the fact that they're afraid of people seeing it doesn't mean it's full of substance and truth.
-Billy
That's bad logic. Spun facts are harder to check than outright lies; if you just check the spun facts, all you'll find is that they're true. The fact that OTHER facts exist that disprove the "spun" conclusion isn't immediately obvious.
In Moore's case, this isn't quite as difficult; many of his "spins" are easily rebutted, since he played tricks like dubbing the wrong answer into his questions, thereby making it look like the answerer was an idiot or dishonest when actually the answer was straightforward and correct. Distortions of that type count as outright lies, since you're presenting things as though one event happened when actually a completely different one did.
I dont have a time machine to go to vietnam to tell if they are lieing, all i can do is look at teh documentation... which says they are lieing.
I guess you're talking about the Swifties now. Their claims are that the awards are improper and some of the documentation is fabricated. How does looking at the documentation help with that? It's begging the question.
Personally, I don't care about the Swifties. I'm willing to give Kerry 100% credit for his medals and awards for his 4 months in Vietnam. He got shot at; I didn't (not having been born at the time). I don't care one bit whether he got a little more credit than he really deserved for one or four specific acts. I still respect his service, and consider it a credit to him.
But it's still only four months, and many other things he's done since weigh heavier on his character, pro and con. Look at them!
-Billy